E 449 
.S88 
Copy 1 



ADDRESS 




BEFORE THE 



ALEM- FEMALE ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, 



ANNUAL MEETING, 



• DECEMBER 7, 1851. 



BY THOMAS T. STONE. 



|)ubUs!)e& t>i> Skrquest 



S A L E 51 ; 
WILLIAM IVES AND CO., PRINTERS....OBSERYER OFFICE. 

1852. 




Class tr.J-h'i^ 
Rnnk ■■ Skk 



AN 

/V 1) I) It ESS 



BEFORE THE 



SALEM FEMALE ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, 



VNNUAI MEETING, 



DEI IEMBE] 



HY THOMAS T. STONE. 



JJillili'.sIjri/ b£ i ;rr,i;i -.; 



S A L E M : 

WILLIAM IVES AND CO., rRINTERS.... OBSERVER OFFICE. 

1852, 



'■■IS (o "/ 1 



s 






ADDRESS 



Women of the Anti-Slavery Society : 

You will pardon some personal references, such 
as I have not been accustomed to make at other times. 
Yon have done a noble work. Early you enlisted in 
the organized action for freedom ; when your doctrines 
were disowned and perverted, your measures denoun- 
ced and ridiculed, and your friends, if not yourselves, 
assailed even to the extent of violence. Some of yon, 
perhaps, have met that deepest of sorrows, not the 
sneer of the world, not the coldness or hostility of 
friends, but the interruption of religious communion. 
Within the church, from which you had drawn a faith 
dearer than the blood of your own hearts ; from the 
pulpit, to which that faith had trained you to look with 
reverence, and out of which you were accustomed to 
wait for words of holiest cheer and mightiest energies ; 
among religious associates, with whom your fresh and 
youthful zeal expected sympathy, and, if wise and care- 
ful counsel, yet not the less encouragement and bene- 
diction ; you found — I will say merely, something else. 
How many were unable to surmount the resistance ! — 
True to your earliest pledges, you have stood. God 
bless you, my sisters ! On this, the last evening I 
may meet you here, I cannot decline the privilege of 
a farewell prayer : — God bless your persons and your 
deeds ! 



4 

For myself, I owe you thanks. You have thought 
mo worthy to speak to you several times before ; and 
lo my words you have always been indulgent. I 
have never known you withhold your kindness and 
your sympathy. Your invitation has been to sincerity 
and faithfulness. I have tried to answer it. This is 
probably the last endeavor I shall be able to make. 
I should have hoped otherwise once. I had hoped to 
remain with you years ; and when I grew old, to be 
here at home ; and when I left you, to give my 
body to the same spot where those dearest to me 
sleep already. But this may not be. Therefore to 
you. sisters. I wish now to pronounce my farewell ; 
and, moreover, as to others with whom my relations 
arc intimate and sacred, 1 am soon to speak my last 
word, so to this more promiscuous assembly, I would 
oiler some thoughts not unfit, 1 trust, either to your 
purposes or to my condition. Permit me then at such 
an hour to begin with some Confession of the Faith 
which, as I have understood it, calls me to services 
like this. 

Of that Faith, the first principle is simply the reality 
of God. God does really exist I Not only did he of 
old create the heavens and the earth ; he dwells in 
those heavens, he penetrates and fills that earth, now 
and forever. Not only did he create man in his 
image some thousand years ago ; he renews that image 
through each generation, and is still life and inspir- 
ation to mankind. Not only did he speak to man 
through Hebrew prophets and apostles ; his word is 
still near us, in the heart which receives it, in the 
kingdom of God within us. Not only did ho give H 



living form and expression in the Christ of Judea ; 
he renews the utterance for every ear which is open 
to hear ; and amidst the diverging paths stretching 
out before us beyond our sight, the voice still sounds 
from behind us, This is the way, walk ye in it. — 
Days come and go ; nights recede and return ; sea- 
sons revolve in perpetual cycles ; the leaves fall not 
more surely than men, generations, nations, epochs ; 
all things which touch the senses, grow, change, ex- 
pire ; there is One, in all, through all, around all, 
without shade, without decay ; his life, eternity ; his 
light, everlasting and unclouded sun ; the word, un- 
changing amidst mutability ; concentrating all elements 
of perfection, so removed infinitely from the realm of 
death, entering it only to quicken ; and at once teach- 
ing and strengthening men by the spirit which lives 
at the centre of the whole and of each soul and 
thing. The Word of God ! It is indeed contained, as 
we have been taught, in the Scriptures ; but it is not 
confined to them : it existed before they were written ; 
it exists where they remain unknown ; it is present 
beyond the range of their possible circulation. By it, 
the heavens and the earth were made. By it, the 
processes of the ages move onward in their silent and 
majestic courses. By it, the soul in every man is 
quickened and enlightened. God's Word is fountain 
of man's thought and love. The Word of God is no 
other than God himself, that is, infinite and unchange- 
able Love, communicating his fulness through the 
creations of its own power. So real is God to us ! 

Of this same Faith the second principle is the ca- 
pacity of man to perceive and obey the Present God. 



Nature obeys without consciously perceiving him : bad 
men may perceive him, and yet disobey : but each 
man is able to obey not less than perceive : and the 
truly good man does. The wisdom of the universe 
shines, sunlike, upon the soul ; he rejoices in the 
vision. The spirit of the universe breathes, a vital 
air, over and into the heart; he takes it in, and gives 
it forth as life and power. This is the grand dis- 
tinction of man. And always tbe truest man is he 
who most completely receives and fulfils the wonder- 
ful idea. His is an infinite humility ; not only when 
he speaks words of prayer does he say tbat God is 
all, himself as nothing ; but bis whole life is free 
self-abandonment to the absorbing presence. All the 
time, out in the streets, there in the shop, in the 
midst of his family, evcry-where, he is living in and 
from that secret and closed recess, where the spirit of 
man is reached and renewed by the spirit of God ; 
and so the universe is radiant with truth, nay, grows 
up around him as larger temple of which he is 
shrine. Such is man, not in the apostacy and sin 
which deform his existence, but in the. genuine nature 
which images the Eternal. 

From these two principles we advance to certain 
practical ideas : — The worth of our nature — The sym- 
pathy and cooperation which we owe one to another. 

The worth of our nature ! The phrase may sound 
like cant to some, like falsehood to others. Let theo- 
logical questions go for the present ; dismiss all theories 
of our primitive or our present state, of its depravity 
or its innocence ; still it stands out the same in either 
view. Man, as such,— man in virtue of the elements 



which constitute his being, — is of unspeakable worth. 
The very depth of his fall, suppose it ever so great, 
does but assure us of the height at which he stands, 
when indeed he stands. A nature capable of that 
terrible consciousness, remorse, sorrow for sin, repent- 
ance, is a nature which the Infinite alone can fill ; — 
its powers and its wants ; its aspirations and its des- 
pondences ; its struggles and defeats and victories ; its 
visions of God, and Heaven, and Hell ; its Alpine 
ascents and its cavernous descents ; its eastern para- 
dise, which interprets the grandest prophecies of the 
New Jerusalem : and its sunless depths, which inter- 
pret the horrors its darker thought has assigned to 
an infernal doom ; — all in their several ways indi- 
cate the essential greatness, the divine destiny, of 
human nature. These arc real states of men ; not the 
prerogatives of the few, not the consciousness only of 
some select souls, but the common experience, in dif- 
ferent degrees of development, of all mankind. To the 
eye lighted by divine faith, they make all outward 
distinctions among men little and worthless. That eye 
seeth man in God ; it seeth not king or subject, chief- 
tain or vassal, priest or laic, noble or vulgar, male or 
female, statesman or citizen, rich or poor, master or 
servant ; — these are floating cloud-fringes, fading dew- 
tints, any the smallest and briefest shows which things 
take on and put off in their hourly changes. But 
man in God, rather God in man, — the Highest dwel- 
ling in each and all ;— before this majestic presence 
the spirit bends in reverence — the finite person widens 
and rises into immeasurable grandeur ; man is full of 
worth, because God alone is great. There are persons 



8 

who can scarce go into a house devoted to religion: 
services, without uncovering the head and treading 
softly and speaking in the lowest tones, so reverend 
the ideal forms which the place summons about them : 
greatest of all, the Being whose name has been so 
often uttered there ; then, it may be, the venerable 
and the young, the parents and ihe children, the 
cheerful and the sorrowful, who have been there so 
often for solace or excitement, but are there no more 
forever ; with the numberless private memories of holi- 
est things, seeming here to live anew. If we saw 
things aright, we should see men, all men, with a 
kindred, but deeper reverence ; the Infinite is there 
enshrined ; the germs of immortal worship, the capa- 
cities, larger than thought, expanded into powers greater 
than those of the outward world, a whole nature re- 
vealing the promise of its everlasting destinies. Such 
the latent worth of each human bein 

Herein the ground of a religious sympathy. There 
are several relations generated of the outward dis- 
tinctions among men ; family kindred, neighborhood, 
country, peculiarities of race, affinities of manners or 
pursuits, diversities of station, artificial classifications ol 
society, and, in a word, whatever separates some 
and attracts others. A religious sympathy has its life 
in the godlike elements deposited in the centre of 
every soul. Conscious of these elements in itself, it 
recognizes them in others. Its family comprehends 
whatever is divine in heaven or on earth. Its neigh- 
borhood lies in neither east nor west, neither north 
nor south, neither ancient continent nor modern, nor 
in isles of sea or ocean ; it is no other than the on< 



9 

realm which unites earth and heaven. So, regarding 
all other sources and conditions of sympathy, they are 
of the celestial fountain ; they spread out into the 
celestial ocean. Private relations and the sympathies 
connected with them, furnish the objects and the ma- 
terials of its exercise ; but they do not exhaust its 
elements or impair its quality; they are the forms nnd 
robes in which it walks, but it takes them all up 
into its own elevation, and brightens them with the 
rays of its transfigured splendor. So wherever men 
rejoice, it rejoices with them; wherever men suf- 
fer, it suffers with them. There have been men, 
dearly loving, dearly loved of, their own wives and 
children and friends, ready to any sacrifice for their 
comfort, or to save them from distress, who yet could 
exult over the details of a battle gained by their own 
country, perhaps in the most unrighteous strife; forget- 
ting altogether the wives and children and friends to 
Avhom each death has brought as it were another 
death, in the sorrows, the wants, the untold sufferings, 
which the slain have escaped, to which survivors are 
doomed. Just so we might speak of other things. 
Who could tell of the youthful loves, promising to 
themselves lifelong happiness, which were blighted for- 
ever, while at the very instant, the same affections 
were glowing in the heart of John Newton, as he 
freighted his ship with the human cargo, consigned to 
everlasting bereavement and sorrow 1 As the divine 
sympathy grew within his consciousness, he learned 
through it what he was doing ; his nearer duties 
were none the less faithfully performed, but his heart 
entered into the whole living heart of humanity ; he 
2 



10 

execrated Ins former pursuit, and made himself one 
with the outcast and despised, whose number he had 
in his blindness helped to swell. The very spirit of 
the Lord, in which we become all of us members one 
of another ! 

Sympathy docs not finish the service which devout 
fraternity excites. It developes itself in cooperation ; it 
makes us Work not only for each other, but with 
each other. The personal experience of want teaches 
us what are the wants of others ; the same experience 
foretels the sublime destinies of humanity ; and the 
love which sanctifies it, determines the man to live, 
not for himself, but for his race. The methods of his 
action may be numberless ; he may sow and reap the 
lields ; he may go forth over the sea ; he may be 
mechanic, in any of the multiform employments which 
the name suggests ; he may be scholar, reading and 
thinking obscurely in his closet ; he may be preacher 
of a divine message ; he may pursue the course, 
whatever it be, to which nature and circumstan- 
ces open the way ; let him only hold himself as 
hallowed of God and loving to men ; he is working 
for them, and working with them every where and 
at all times. The type of this vast cooperation is 
given us in nature : Sun and stars and moon are up 
there in the heavens ; the earth rolls here alone and 
silent ; here are vast oceans, numberless seas and 
bays, indenting all lands : here are lakes and rivers, 
amidst deep forests or cultivated soils ; trees, flowers, 
grasses, plants, growing everywhere ; a transparent 
atmosphere spreads over the whole ; light ilows undim- 
med through it, or shaded by clouds or vapors ; and 



11 

indefinite hosts of animals, from the verge of uncon- 
scious vegetation up to the sublimest forms of human 
thought and love; all united from within by mystic 
attractions and concords. Not the trite, antique notion 
of a golden chain let down from the supreme throne 
to go round and bind together the severed masses 
and forms of earth and sky : the power is more in- 
ward and sacred. The plastic spirit living throughout 
the whole draws them to harmony, and joins remotest 
things in sympathetic cooperation. As the moon moves 
in her changing beauty, the water flows and reflows 
over ocean and land. As the earth turns its zones to- 
ward the sun, grass grows, flowers blow, trees are 
green, fruits swell, harvests ripen, birds sing and build 
their nests, animals all welcome the spring and sum- 
mer, and the heart of man rejoices in the joy welling 
up from the deep heart of nature. There is nothing 
which can be spared : — nothing, from the grandest sun 
in the vast expanse to the least fibre in the most frag- 
ile form or the minutest grain of sand which the 
wind takes up in street or field : each has its service, 
each is in intimate relations with the whole, and the 
whole again is forever concentrating itself upon the 
parts, — upon every part. Highest in this universal coop- 
eration, are the reciprocal and perpetual activities of love 
in the human heart. How have the lives of patriarchs, 
of heroes, of prophets, of apostles, of saints and mar- 
tyrs, passed through the works they wrought, even 
through the sufferings they endured, and not only 
within the consciousness of men, but far beyond all 
suspicion, into the great current of human existence ! 
Who can tell how unlike this New England of ours, 



12 

<o what n would have been if Socrates had not lived and 
died more than two thousand years ago in a Grecian City ; 
•still more, if a Moses had not far earlier yet been taken up 
from the banks of the Nile ! I need scarcely add such later 
name as Paul of Tarsus ; and there is One, whose toils 
and tears not only consecrate Palestine for all ages, but 
signify to those ages a life identified with the blessedness of 
mankind. ^Whatevcr in fact through the universe proceeds 
from God, is clement and portion of the activity, which 
strives for the utmost good ; which lightens heavy burdens, 
and soothes sad hearts, and inspires life and joy; which 
obeys the mighty influence, drawing soul to soul, and, 
falling at the right hour and in the right place into the di- 
vine currents, swells them to wider compass and urges 
them onward with grander force to the issues of the Love 
from which they flow. tSuch the majestic and benignant 
cooperation, into which the Lord combines all the powers 
of human sympathy. 

If it were in my power so to present these declarations 
of the Faith which this occasion suggests, as to make them 
clear to each heart. I should feel little doubt that one spon- 
tantaneous outburst of your feelings would reveal to you 
how great and dear they arc. They need no proofs. They 
stand above the realm of question and argument. They 
transcend logic ; they seek not discussion, but hearty ac- 
ceptance. Let these sentiments inspire and control me • 
you would have no further doubt what must be the quality 
of my life. They cannot be excessive ; they cannot reach 
too far; they cannot draw me too closely to any thing that 
lives in the universe. The more full and perfect they be- 
come in any soul, the more godlike and humane that soul 
is. The announcement is pledge of the response. 



13 

Now the great idea which the evening invites us to con- 
template, is not a deduction from these principles, is not a 
remote and logical sequence from such premises; it is simp- 
ly the direct application of them to a particular portion of 
mankind, and to a particular class of our human relations. 
That portion of mankind is the enslaved ; that class of re- 
lations is the whole compass of our connexions and duties 
to the enslaved; immediately, those on the American soil: 
indirectly, those on the whole face of the earth. Every 
American slave it recognizes as all which the name of man 
involves; every slave it recognizes as one among the 
myriads whom the Divine Image ennobles and destines to 
immortality; every slave it approaches with reverence as 
child of the common Father, and so connected with the 
human race by divine and universal sympathies. Of every 
slave it says no more, but it can say no less, than of every 
other human being; — just so much ; and therefore demands 
that every slave be treated, not as slave, which human 
tyranny has made him, but as man whom Divine Love 
made him. To put my thought into other language : — 
The Anti Slavery movement proposes merely the Divine 
Law of Justice and Love, as the principle by which all our 
intercourse with those now held in slavery shall be regula- 
ted. The slaveholder appears with his claim and his 
profession : — " My slaves are rightfully mine ; my money 
and that of my ancestors purchased them ; the laws of my 
State and my country recognize and protect them as mine. 
Moreover, I feed them, I clothe them, I give them habita- 
tions, home, care and discipline. And I am careful that 
my provisions for them be sufficient and permanent ; that 
they neither suffer while able to labor, nor decline unat- 
tended when age comes over them. Such a relation, so 



14 

regulated, and really blessing the servant no less thai 
benefitting the master, lias in its behalf more than public 
sentiment or political enactments ; it has the very letter of 
both Old Testament and New." Is there any thing to say 
against so plausible a justification? Bring into compari- 
son with it the simple declarations of the Faith which has 
been now confessed. Let the Abolitionist stand forth, and 
speak his word : — " I have nothing now to say concerning 
the treatment which the slave receives, beyond that single 
feature of it which makes him slave. Grant that he is 
well fed, well clothed, well housed. Grant that he escapes 
the lash and the branding-iron, and all the tortures which 
irresponsible power lodged in men's hands is so apt to in- 
flict. Grant all this; but he is slave at least, lie is held 
as property, he is bought as property ; he is sold as pro- 
perty. The husband and the wife, the parent and the 
child, each is held as separate article of property, subject 
to all the fluctuations of property ; kept together, not by 
the sacredness of the relationship, but by the will of the pro- 
prietor ; and separated, not by the processes of nature, but 
by caprice or interest as the one or the other may demand. 
Marriage, according to the true idea and order, is necessa- 
rily precluded by this one vitiating element, — this conver- 
sion of man into commodity. Man — Property ! The two 
conceptions are irreconcilable. If man, then not property ; 
if property, then not man. Tell me never of man, image 
and son of the present God, the being of such immeasura- 
ble worth, connected with his brethren by deepest and 
ineradicable sympathies, and together with them and God 
workers of an immortal destiny ; tell me never of man, so 
divinely framed, so largely endowed, as, on the one side, 
rightful holder of his own race for property and merchan- 



15 

dise ; as, on the other, legitimate matter of possession and 
traliic. The monstrous outrage must sooner or later show 
to all eyes as a barbarism at which humanity is abashed. 
That it exists, suggests almost the fear that the grand 
Faith contains some latent illusion. Only with the confi- 
dence that it is temporary, and while existing wrought 
mysteriously into some thread of a mightier destiny, does 
the fear pass away, and the faith prove itself just and glo- 
rious. And then the statutes and political constitutions 
which sustain the monstrous claim ! Tell me not of them. 
Sin is no better, because it has been enacted by King or 
Congress. Nay, the enactment contains in itself the prin- 
ciple which anmls and makes it void. I reverence Law; 
just for this reason do I hate lawless tyranny. The decrees 
of the Czar, by which Poland is rent and enthralled, by 
which Hungarian patriots are driven into exile, and the 
independence of European nations seems endangered, are 
entitled to precisely the same estimate with the decrees of 
Legislatures or the American Congress, by which the South 
is doomed to the enslavement of half its population ; by 
which our countrymen are driven to the alternative of sla- 
very or exile; and if they choose the latter, chased by the 
officers of despotism to the very line, which separates us 
from the colonies of an European monarchy. Tell me 
what you will of Laws making men property ; I reverence 
Law, — therefore do I pronounce these statutes lawless and 
anarchic, impieties to God and tyrannies to men. I will 
try to prove my fidelity to true government by my treason 
to demoniac usurpation. I reverence Law ; therefore I 
will obey it, though states, republics, congresses, the world 
itself, blaspheme its name by connecting herewith their 
own enormities. Not who made the statute determines 



16 

whether it be true law ; but what it is. Never can a 
majority" impose obligation ; the question is forever open, 
Have the majority done right? Very often they have done 
wrong. Further still, you assure me the Bible justifies 
slavery. Well, slavery then condemns the Bible. I cer- 
tainly should be very slow to admit that, correctly inter- 
preted, its language read through its spirit instead of its 
spirit enthralled to its language, the Bible could be fairly 
claimed, as it is now so often and so confidently claimed, 
to shield and even to sanctify American shivery. — If, how- 
ever, it be so, — if language, spirit, all, throughout, go for 
the enormity, the conclusion is a very plain one: The 
Bible cannot make wrong, right; falsehood, truth: dark- 
ness, light ; and the sole grounds on which the sacrcdness 
of the Bible or any Book can possibly stand, fall from un- 
der it the instant it is shown to contradict the eternal laws, 
the secret oracle, the everlasting God within. If all public 
religions pronounce tyranny, lawful government; and 
injustice, rectitude; and cruelty, virtue; if all public re- 
ligions catch up the politician's audacity, and stigmatize 
sympathy with the oppressed as prejudice, and call on us 
to conquer it ; if they join in the sneer, now so rife and 
biting, at sickly sentiment or idle abstraction, because the 
freedom of a man is preferred to the demands of pride or 
power or wealth ; then let those public religions stand, if 
so they can, without freedom, without humanity, without 
God ; — I would rather retire into the lonely sanctuary, and 
worship in the wilderness; at least, God is present, the 
heavens are open, angels will bless me with their minis- 
tries !" — With such clearness of sight, such calmness of 
spirit, such steadfast faith, the true man may put away 
from himself the smooth speeches, the plausible arguments, 



17 

the cunning sophistries, by which American tyranny, just 
like all other despotisms of ancient or modern times, strives 
to reconcile itself with the religious faith, the moral sense, 
the conscience, the reason, and the humanities of the liv- 
ing soul. 

Just here the great movement of the last twenty years 
in behalf of Freedom began. Its origin is, Faith in the 
absolute and unchangeable Justice. Hence it has been 
from the first the broadest movement of the age. The 
Christian Religion, united with other tendencies, both of 
the individual and of society, had reached a point of ne- 
cessary application to this form of human l wickedness. 
The issue has come, as it must come. The great alterna- 
tive is presented to the nation, as it must be presented. 
The mighty problem has been stated, as it must be stated. 
It is very simple : — The Eternal God, or temporary gain ; 
the living man, or dead expediency; spiritual worth, or 
material value ; divine union, or local confederacy; virtu- 
ous cooperation, or vicious policy. The very same problem 
which has been so often proposed ; so often set at naught, 
yet forever recurring: If the Lord be God, worship him ; 
if not, where is your God? Preachers had been long cal- 
ling men to the decision. Preachers had long and loudly 
cried out to men, " Repent and forsake your sins." They 
had solemnly declared, " No sin is to be cherished, even 
for an instant. Of whatever there is in our hearts or our 
conduct contrary to the unchangeable principles of the 
Divine Law, let the repentance be immediate, entire, final ; 
admit no qualifications, no limit, no apologies. Forsake 
all sin, and forsake it now." The first Abolitionists 
understood the preachers as they preached. They saw 
the sin, present, palpable, atrocious; and what the pulpit 
3 



18 

had labored to prove and impress on them, they accepted 
and repeated. Each man has a divine right to freedom ; 
such the nation's confession of faith. To make him a 
slave is therefore sin both to God and to man — to keep him 
as slave is simply making him slave each successive in- 
stant. The inference is irresistible; the sin must be 
forsaken, forsaken immediately; that is, let the slave 
receive immediate emancipation. Let the claimant of 
property in man surrender his false pretence ; let the State, 
so far as its constitution and statutes uphold the oppressive 
power, correct its constitutions and its statutes ; let the 
Federal Government, so far as it sanctions slavery, with- 
draw the sanction. Such is the Immutable Law, 
immediate abandonment of sin. As for difficulties, 
disadvantages, losses, consequences of all sorts, it has but 
one word to say : — Be they what they may, God must be 
obeyed. Though the heavens themselves fall, Justice 
must be done: — Slavery being, what a distinguished holder 
of slaves declared, a enrse to the master, a wrong, a 
grievous wrong, to the slave, nothing remained but either 
obedience to the divine voice, which is emancipation, or 
denial of essential wrong in the act of enslavement, or ob- 
livion of the moral question. Few were found ready for the 
first; such as regarded either conscience in themselves or 
the sentiments of other men, adopted the second course, 
denying the intrinsic and essential wrong of the enslaving 
act; many seem to have blinked the religious and moral 
question. Whence there have remained these two great 
tasks; the one, to convince a nation professing freedom 
and extolling Jesus Christ, that to deprive an innocent man 
of his freedom is neither right nor christian ; the other, to 
arouse the conscience to sincere and faithful action. 






19 

These statements will help to explain the relations of 
this grand movement to the Colonization of free colored 
men on the Coast of Africa. Now, he it observed that the 
first doctrine it assumed was, Immediate and Unconditional 
Emancipation, the Right of the Slave, the Duty of the 
Master. The doctrine implied the right of the emancipated 
to choose, like others, their own place of abode, whether 
in Africa, or in America. If of themselves, from unforced 
and perfectly free choice, they wished to leave their native 
land, the home of their parents and their friends, every 
thing which is dear even to the slave in the name of coun- 
try, and to remove to a distant and foreign coast, amidst 
all the hardships and perils of such an enterprise, the abo- 
litionist had, of course, nothing to say; if they would do 
so, whatever his opinion of the wisdom or the folly of the 
measure, they must not be hindered. Nay, if out of friend- 
ship and sympathy, societies were formed to aid their 
purpose, so be it. But these were not the facts. These 
natives of our own soil, as most of them were and are, had 
no desire to leave their father-land. But their father-land 
they must abandon, or else remain slaves or suffer the bit- 
terest persecutions of an inhuman and impious prejudice. 
To colonization on such principles and conditions, they 
must stand in direct conflict. The Eternal Law demands 
instant freedom, unconditional freedom, precisely the free- 
dom which the American Republic affirms and vindicates 
in behalf of all citizens. Nothing less; as much more as 
the progress of humanity may gain for the whole. The 
conclusion is very natural, that a freedom granted only on 
condition of sacrificing country, home, and friends, is some- 
thing quite different, not to say contrary. The Divine 
Message to our Country could not choose but oppose, nay, 



20 

denounce, measures thus supporting iniquities, indulging 
prejudice, and virtually justifying the half-confessed wrong. 
J5nt this scheme, whatever the intentions with which it 
had been originally framed or with which it continued to 
advance, had gathered into itself most of the religious sym- 
pathy which existed throughout the country toward its 
enslaved population. The consequence was, that in addi- 
tion to the general insensibility and the political interests 
which resisted the great Word, it had an organization, 
strong in itself and identified with the religious enterprtses 
of the day, to resist its progress. This, joined with the 
various theological peculiarities of the earlier advocates 
of freedom, alarmed many to whom Christianity and the 
church appeared only through the forms to which they had 
been accustomed to attach the names; while again, the 
manifold relations both of sects and of states, as well as of 
pecuniary interests, between the several portions of our 
confederation, all conspiring to uphold slavery, and to 
deepen the prejudice against the oppressed class, served to 
combine those mightiest agents in human allairs, Religion 
and Politics, against the millions whom both had oppressed. 
The last battle-cry, which now rallies the multitudes of 
our countrymen against the Lord and his Truth is, the 
Union of the States, — the country, we might say from 
the words of no obscure politician, the country, however 
bounded. The religious sects pronounce their benediction on 
the Knights who go forth to fight for the compromise, which 
sacrifices God to Mammon, Justice to Tyranny, Freedom 
to Slavery, Man to Pride, or Lust, or Avarice; all which 
constitutes true Union, to that which spreads the deceptive 
show over real and volcanic elements of discord. Now let 
it be that we have been pugnacious and obstinate, severe, 



21 

violent, ready to take fire at any thing, and to assail all 
divine and human things with indiscriminate rage; yet 
this we do say; we pronounce it with confidence : — It is a 
mighty Truth, the revelation of God in Humanity, with 
which we have been charged. This also we may likewise 
affirm: — A conflict of Truth with these several forms of 
hostility has been inevitable. When men said, the slave 
must not live free within his native state or country, what 
less could the Truth than contradict the assertion, and 
overthrow the policy which embodied it? When Catholics 
and Protestants of all sects united in sanctioning slavery, 
and binding this dead and noisome carcase to the living 
form of Christianity, what less could the Truth do than 
proclaim the falseness of the misnamed Christianity, and 
vindicate Jesus and the Father from such blasphemies? 
And when all, in state or church, in high places or low 
places, religious or irreligious, lifted up their voices and 
cried, The Glorious Union, at all events this must be 
preserved ; what less could the Truth than proclaim, Any 
Union which crushes freedom and perpetuates injustice, is 
inglorious and false; let the strongest confederacy perish, 
rather than the ends of justice, of freedom, of humanity, — 
the sole ends which can make it holy,— fail through its 
treachery and baseness? The spirit has met each issue 
which has arisen, simply demanding that, above all fluc- 
tuations and turbulences and interests, its calm voice be 
heard and obeyed :— God is all in all. That is the whole. 
We may well rejoice in the precise issue which has now 
come. We may well rejoice in the necessity, from which 
the country cannot escape, to meet the simple question, 
whether it will acknowledge as Supreme, God or Human 
Will. Men may tell us, if they choose, that this is not the 



22 

question. They may say that God is doubtless to be 
obeyed against the power of men and states; but then God 
himself requires us to obey, for example, the statute by 
which the Union is now convulsed. This statute, in other 
words, is right. With any man who avows this opinion, 
who pronounces the statute essentially right, — it is of little 
use, certainly for me, to reason. There is no common 
ground to stand upon. We begin our processes of thought 
at different points; we diverge farther and farther as we 
go forward, as if one of us were moving westward, the oth- 
er eastward. We must settle a prior question, before we 
could approach each other. And that is the very question 
of the age, What is Right 1 What is it in essence, in nature, 
in immutable reality 1 Until such answer as some of us 
have learned, — we thought, from holiest sources, — be prov- 
ed false, and baseless, we must denounce the statute as 
godless, inhuman, unjust; we must proclaim, that, in es- 
tablishing it, the Nation has deepened the atrocity of its 
previous guilt, severed itself into wider distance from God, 
and made itself more false to both its religious creeds and 
its political professions ; so that at this moment it is pre- 
sented in that most degrading attitude, boastful liberty 
masking iron tyranny. If we are mistaken, why not 
teach us, instead of mocking and sneering? With pro- 
foundest reverence we speak, as we think, of a Higher Law 
than the Decrees of a Majority. Is there not a Higher Law ? 
Why then pronounce the word with contempt, and when we 
hint our Faith, cry Nonsense, Treason, Fanaticism ? Why 
that godless sarcasm which has rung through the land, of 
a Law somewhere between here and the third Heavens, 
higher than that which the majority of an American Con- 
gress presumed to pass in the midst of the nineteenth ecu- 



23 

tury, naming Tyranny, Law ? Has proud and boasted 
intellect nothing to speak but such paltry and soulless and 
impious sarcasms? Yes, my friends, we have fallen on 
evil times, and evil tongues ; we have lived to hear even 
Conscience reviled, and men who have faith in the God 
who speaks through it, reproached. With the Bible in our 
hands and the History of Milleniums open for us to read : 
with the names of Moses, confronting the Egyptian king; 
of Elijah, braving the King of Israel and his idolatrous 
priests; of Isaiah, pronouncing woes upon legislators enact- 
ing: unrighteous decrees ; of Daniel, openly disobeying the 
royal edict : of Apostles, setting all power at nought in pro- 
claiming their benignant message ; of Martyrs, nourishing 
the fresh growth of Christianity by their blood ; not to add 
those noble testimonies, which ethnic story has preserved, 
of eastern devotees or western lovers of truth, — with such 
names before us, of those who periled or surrendered life ; 
who went into the den with lions, or the fire as it kindled 
the wood about them ; who laid their bodies under the 
saw, or gave their necks to the sword or the axe ; who first 
endured poverty and shame, then refused not the cross, — 
nay, boasting our relations, through ancestors fugitive for 
their religion, to these devout and heroic spirits ; we have 
not outgone the age of sneers and persecutions aimed at 
conscience and righteousness. If there be no higher law ; 
if our conscience be but an illusion ; is it unreasonable to 
ask that our error be exposed, not our faith spurned, our 
simplicity reviled? If there be such law, and if con- 
science be sacred, the laws and usages of slavery mean- 
while harmonizing with it, we may be pardoned for asking 
that something besides sarcasm, and wrath, and reproach, 
and violence, and cries of treason, be presented as demon- 



24 

strations of the harmony. It avails not to assert, even to 
prove, that they are constitutional, and that tlu>y arc ne- 
cessary for the perpetuation of the Union ; for whether we 
admit or deny the assertion, \vc cannot rid ourselves of the 
conviction that the Constitution itself might sometimes err, 
and that possibly something may be holier and dearer, ev- 
en to an American heart, than this confederacy of states. 
Assure us even that God clothes the Government with 
power to enact such laws, so we must yield to them, as to 
him, unquestioning obedience ; suppose it the obscurity of 
our vision ; deal tenderly with us ; strive to purge our 
dim lights ; for really we cannot see the thing you declare : 
the government establishes and seeks to enforce the deed ; 
that we cannot deny, but the power which looks through 
it and legitimates it, does actually seem to us, not God, 
whom we would gladly obey; but Devil, whom we would 
resist that he may flee from us and from the world. 

Such the Confession, which, as an individual sincerely 
sympathizing with the Anti-Slavery movement and seeking 
its acceleration and success, I have sought to make of the 
Faith it involves. You will perceive, that according to 
these statements it is essentially religious, christian, at once 
pious and humane. If in any respect we have failed to 
develope these qualities ; if we have any of us been in any 
degree irreligious or unchristian, impious or inhuman ; then 
have we been false to the principles it involves and faith- 
less to the service which has been assigned us. You will 
perceive also, that the development of this faith has in fact 
involved us in manifold antagonisms, and, if such you call 
them, aggressions. Why not? The light invades the em- 
pire of darkness without asking leave ; the seed put into 
the earth sprouts and heaves and breaks the crust which 



25 

covers it ; the man invades forests to find himself a home, 
and subdues the elements which incommode him. Not less 
let the Spirit of Freedom, rising sunlike over a realm dark- 
ened like ours by Slavery and its affiliated vices, move 
serenely and steadily forward to drive back the night and 
to lead on the day. Not less let that Spirit, sown in 
the deeper soil of the human heart, rise, upheaving, break- 
ing in pieces, overturning, all institutions and devices of men 
by which it is crushed or oppressed. Not less let it take 
its weapons of celestial temper, all bright and sharp from 
the armory of God, and forward to invade and conquer the 
gigantic evils which a selfish age cherishes for interest or 
pride, and which impious or deluded men pronounce good, 
and call christians and patriots to uphold. The Spirit 
of Freedom ! It is aggressive, authoritative, command- 
ing. It has right so to be. It is the love and the truth 
and the power, whence the existences and the harmonies 
of the universe proceed. Admitted to a human breast, 
let it never be timid or shy ; let it neither falter nor be 
dumb ; let it evade no conflict, let it suppress no truth, 
let it decline no issue, let it shrink from no result. Men 
seem to speak and think as if this were strictly a 
question, a matter of doubtful inquiry, wherein the abo- 
litionist and his opponent stand on equal ground ; and so 
whatever the former says should be merely expression and 
defence of opinions which he holds and the latter rejects ; 
the right or the wrong in the case being still problematical. 
The impression is false. The genuine abolitionist speaks, 
not a private opinion, but the word of God. His ought to 
be the port, not of the debater, not of the logician, not of 
of the orator, not even of the politician, but of the true 
4 



26 

Preacher, the living herald, of a divine message to Ins 
country and his age. Let him speak as uttering an oracle 
of the Eternal. 

I have not finished : but I must relieve your attention. — 
People of Salem! as one of your number, happy to have 
lived with you so long-, with whom 1 should have been 
happy, as 1 said, to die: these words, or rather better 
words than these, words greater, holier, of diviner life and 
power than I can speak, I felt that I could gladly utter 
before I ceased to be with you. They have been long 
growing in my heart. I brought them with me from my 
distant retirement. I have tried, as far as I could, to con- 
vey them to other souls. I trust that they will only be- 
come more vital, more effective, more prolific, in any future 
ministries to which I may be called. If these fail, then all 
things fail. If these are false, then the universe is false ; 
if these are evil, then there is no such thing as good ; nay. 
it' these are anarchic, then men are fatherless and the 
world is without a God. Politicians, degrading the noble 
name, may continue and redouble their sneers and their 
tyrannies ; Preachers, abandoning the Temple of the 
Father for the synagogues of sects and dogmatisms and 
parties, may proclaim basest deeds and laws holy ; Na- 
tions, apostate from God and Truth, may be false and 
cruel still ; but the Word of the Highest is above them all. 
The tumults of partisan conflict, the discords of sects, the 
material interests of states and confederacies, pass away 
with the seasons in which they rise, and swell, and fall; 
the questions which agitate our times will lose themselves 
in oblivion or instill larger problems: but the one great 



27 

problem will survive; whether God, in the Universe and 
in the heart, shall be confessed absolutely supreme, and 
his law of love and justice to all his children shall be ful- 
filled ; or human passions and interests,' expressed by ma- 
jorities and enacted in statutes, shall hold dominion ; this, 
if question at all, is perennial. For our country, the crisis, 
i he judgment, is already presented. It cannot be escaped. 
Private citizens and public representatives, preachers and 
churches, courts, legislatures, congresses, all are summon- 
ed by the trumpet-tones, now rending the very sepulchres 
to stand out and appear in the trial which none can avoid, 
in which character is becoming transparent. Brethren ! 
Sisters ! Let us greet this coming of the Lord. With 
heart, with voice, with hand, let us enter into the strife, 
linn in his strength, joyous in his love, serene in his peace. 
The work is his ; faithfully let us do it : him let us wor- 
ship in fulfilling it. Freedom, Virtue, God ! Herein our 
inspiration and our undying trust. Brethren ! Sisters ! 
Accept these, my last words of service and of cheer. The 
Spirit hallow you with its everlasting benediction ! Fare 
ye well ! 



yy^, '& 



Z R R ATA. 

On page 15th, second line from bottom, for herewith, read therewith. 
On " 24th, line J2th, for dim lights, read dim sight. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



011898 527 8 p 



V» 




